About Steven Watts, Newt Labs

Out of Cambridge, UK, comes a WordPress support and site care company keeping websites secure and effective for over seven years. Founder of Newt Labs, Steven Watts, leads a small team of like-minded individuals who make getting to know their client’s business goals priority. They use this knowledge to then fix, monitor, and maintain these sites, as well as host and develop them.

When the Newt Labs website launched in 2010, it transitioned over the years from providing custom WordPress design and development to WordPress support and maintenance; the primary marketing tool for the company.

Being able to monitor our client's websites around the clock has been one of the most valuable parts of working with Sucuri. Knowing that everything is safe and then being alerted when something is found has helped give us, and our clients, peace of mind when it comes to the security of their websites.

Challenge

Steven and team never have a dull moment - from dealing with a broken or hacked website, clients looking to get support, or clients trying to save time by outsourcing the tedious and technical tasks that inevitably come with the territory of owning a WordPress site.

For Steven, he has chosen to host newtlabs.co.uk and some of his client’s sites on DigitalOcean cloud servers, currently ranging from 1GB-8GB droplets, which benefits from a LEMP stack using the latest technologies and best practices. Newt Labs also uses Cloudflare for an extra layer of performance and security which has naturally inclined their existing clients to follow suit. However, during the process of generating new business, Steven noticed some problems.

Many new clients had come to us with infections. As soon as they arrive we work with them, keeping them calm and fixing their website problems fast, which negates a whole bunch of issues from brand reputation through to emotional upset.

The Newt Labs team seemed to find that many new clients who had hacked sites were also with cheap shared hosting providers who would immediately shut the website down in order to stop the spread of infection. However, sometimes when doing this, it can alter files and ruin the website, resulting in lost functionality. When this occurs, not only does Newt Labs have to cleanup and restore the sites, but now they have to try and piece them back together too.

Solution

Sucuri is a well known, reputable company so I either would have searched for you or gone directly to your website. Knowing Sucuri's reputation allowed us to contact you without hesitation. We didn't have any reservations, being the leader in your field.

With a growing business, it was imperative to keep existing clients happy and get new clients onboard as efficiently as possible. Before any major developing could take place, each site would need a reliable website security system to monitor and protect, with solutions that would give Steven and his clients peace of mind.

Steven immediately contacted a Sucuri representative via live chat and then later in the evening spoke directly with Incident Response Team members who were able to further assess the situation and advise on the best possible fixes to their variety of problems.

The monitoring solution continues to allow Steven to monitor all of his client's websites, while the firewall blocks attacks. Newt Labs is now backed by Sucuri’s incident response team 24/7 providing a confidence that they have extra pairs of hands should they need it.

We spoke to a Sucuri support person before the purchase of the product and they gave some really good general advice about more ways we could harden our server security as well as advising on the right product level for our site, helping us choose Pro, we were considering Business.Within 3 minutes we received an email saying the scanner found and removed the malware.

Results

Sucuri’s monitoring services alert the team at Newt Labs of any potential security issues and threats. Equally, the Sucuri dashboard metrics are all handy in their own way to Steven and his team. These reports include: remote malware detection, blacklist status, uptime, DNS/SSL/WHOIS changes, server-side scanner findings, number of requests allowed/blocked, The dashboard and email reports provide them with the ability to see the specific issues right away and quickly request malware cleanup for each site.

Above all, server-side scanning is Steven’s favorite service since it’s not a feature offered through other services used to maintain his website. It allows them to scan every file on their servers looking for backdoors, phishing and other security threats in addition to remote monitoring, giving Newt Labs complete information about the security state of their websites.

Lastly, as a company with many client websites, Newt Labs has chosen Sucuri’s Agency Plan. Here is Steven’s take on the plan’s benefits:

We've been able to scale up as needed. It's flexible, allowing us to change the number of monitoring and firewall slots to balance them out based on what our clients are asking for.

I would recommend the agency plan to others in the WordPress support and maintenance space, especially for those who are currently using plugins, which use the client’s resources and don't always have the full effect of server-side and cloud technologies.

An advantage with the agency plan that gives companies like mine a step ahead and peace of mind, is knowing you have protocols in place for detection, protection and response, which are key for when something goes wrong at the worst time.

Having an expert team on the bench who can get you out of a sticky situation when you've exhausted all your resources can be vital to keeping your company in the game and delighting your clients in the process. After speaking with many businesses I often find that these processes are not thought of until it's too late so I certainly recommend being a bit more proactive and checking out Sucuri's agency plan.

The agency plan is the optimal Sucuri solution for growing businesses. Newt Labs continues to contact Sucuri’s Incident Response Team for any problems or concerns big or small for its client’s website security needs.